He dined in the evening in town, alone, at an hotel—a thing he had not done for perhaps ten years. He purposely remained in that hotel for many hours, that he might be alone when he should reach home, and that he might sleep before the very name M’Korio should reach his ears again. He took the 11.2, and did not reach his station till twenty minutes to twelve. It was close upon midnight when he unlocked the door of Avonmore. He saw lights and heard voices; he came into the smoking-room whence they proceeded, and saw at the fire the profile of Cosmo, a little table with glasses, syphons and a whisky bottle, and beyond them, in his own deep padded chair, a cranium and a back which were most certainly those of Mr Barnett: of Mr Barnett in repose. FOOTNOTES: [9] As the scurrilous poem beginning “It is, it is the Canon’s opening roar,” or the deliberate misprinting of the peroration to his Romanes lecture on Historical Christianity, “The soul of Ananias like a star,” etc. CHAPTER IX Mr Barnett did not rise. He held between his hands such “teeming destinies,” he controlled in the pursuit of his high mission so many various men, that his life necessarily suffered from the tension of artificial effort. He was the more inclined to relax upon those occasions when he felt himself in the presence of friends who were bound to him by ties of gratitude. That evening in Norwood such a temptation was enhanced by the influence of a cosy room, soda water, spirits, a deeply padded chair, two magazines, Scotch whisky, and all the atmosphere of refinement. He relaxed, I say, and a more truly lovable, because a more real Mr Barnett shone outwards through the surface of the man: a Mr Barnett not anxious for his accent or any other thing; a Mr Barnett interior, domestic, and at ease. In such a mood he saw no need to rise; but his courtesy did not forsake him, nor the inbred habit of a man of the world. He lifted himself some inches from the chair by a pressure of his left hand and stretched out his right towards the owner of the house. The high cosmopolitan sphere in which Mr Barnett had been formed is naturally indifferent, as our eager English gentry also are, to the conventions of the suburbs; but my readers will already have learnt that nothing could offend Mr Burden more than a breach of the usages of Norwood. Mr Barnett’s attitude was at first incredible to him: to this incredulity succeeded a burst of anger. The late hour, the recent quarrel with his oldest friend, and, doubtless, the approach of illness, might have betrayed Mr Burden into an irrevocable step. He might have left the room without speaking. He might even, so thoroughly was he put out, have manœuvred for his guest’s departure by that process of persistent, patient pressure which is called “kicking a man out of one’s house.” He might have sworn—had not Cosmo, with an excellent comprehension of his father’s petty vagaries, saved the position.